Denis Villeneuve’s quick, gruelling ride-along through the war on drugs shoved your face in rot while demanding you notice its sophisticated visual and sound design. I liked it but was quite done with its “fight monsters with monsters” baseline long before the credits rolled.

Villeneuve has not returned for the sequel, Sicario: Day Of The Soldado, which translates to the appropriately redundant “Assassin: Day Of The Soldier.” Italian TV director Stefano Sollima takes over, making an adequate pass at impersonating Villeneuve’s visual language and squirm-inducing tension.

Also sitting this one out is Emily Blunt, whose FBI agent was the original’s ineffectual moral centre; she was our eyes and ears in a cynical movie populated with hyper-violent pawns.

The action picks up with two unconnected terrorist bombings: the first among migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border and the second in a Kansas City store. Determining that drug cartels are now smuggling people (suicide-bombers among them), the U.S. government includes them in their war on terror. This is writer Taylor Sheridan’s aggressive grab at current politics and his entry point for oh-so-much violence.

Graver now has a bigger budget and more freedom to wage his clandestine operations on cartels (I don’t know that this was an issue for him in the first movie). He enlists Alejandro in a plot against the cartel boss ultimately responsible for the death of the latter’s family. They kidnap the kingpin’s feisty daughter Isabel (Isabela Moner) in a nicely staged SUV takedown and then try to pin the act on rival cartels.

The plan goes sour and the mercenaries have to cut ties. But Alejandro gets sentimentally attached to Isabel, refusing when instructed to kill his enemy’s daughter. This is the same guy who didn’t flinch when offing a mother and two children in front of their father in the first movie.

The hard left turn will likely be more enjoyable for audiences who hit snooze on the original. You certainly don’t need it to follow the action as Soldado trips into a fugitive thriller and operates less as a sequel and more as an audience-friendly corrective with franchise potential (“Let’s remake Sicario – but more fun!”).

And yet there isn’t enough skill or imagination here to escape the shadow cast by Villeneuve’s film. The tone and structure (including a parallel subplot setting up a grim collision) is replicated but with competing directives in terms of what Soldado wants to be. It all leads up to a messy last act that’s laughable.